After Tehran (9 page)

The title of the article was “The Woman without a Past.” I truly
had
been a woman without a past. I had been stripped of my identity in Evin—at least, this was what the prison authorities had tried to do to me, and for a long time, they seemed to have succeeded. For close to twenty years, I had floated in the world like a shadow, meaningless and without a destination. Now everything was different. I had taken charge. I had stood up.

Within a few hours, my inbox was full of supportive emails from friends and acquaintances. One of the messages was from Flavia, my book-club friend:

Dear Marina
,

Are you moved? In a stupor? I imagine your feelings are very mixed today
.

Thank you for allowing some of your heart to be placed on the page. I know there will be many people who will be touched—all for different reasons. You did the right thing.

People were indeed touched. Telling my story had become such a desperate need for me that I had not thought much about reactions. My neighbours now looked at me as if they had never seen me before. When we ran into one another after the article appeared, they stopped and shook my hand and said they had no idea I had had such a difficult past. They said, as well, that they didn’t know Iran had so many political prisoners and treated them so badly. When I told them that the majority of the prisoners had been teenagers, they wanted to know why, and I explained to them that if you wanted to control a country, you had to control its young generation. If you tortured and executed teenagers, not only would the rest of them get the message, but their parents, too, would refrain from criticizing the government, realizing the high price of dissidence.

I took a copy of the
Sunday Star
to my father. I had told him I was writing a memoir. I explained that the article in the paper was a summary of what had happened to me in Evin. He put the paper on his kitchen table and began telling me about one of his neighbours who was moving to a nursing home because she had become too weak to care for herself. My father was not ready to acknowledge my past. I had to give him time.

About two weeks later, I phoned my father and asked him if he had read the article. He said he had not and changed the subject. I had expected Alik to call me, but I didn’t hear a word from him. They were both still intent on ignoring my past. I decided not to bring up the topic again unless they mentioned it themselves. It was now their turn to take a step forward. Except, they didn’t. I was
my family’s dirty laundry, and to their horror, I had hung myself out to dry in public.

After the article appeared, I felt awkward at Swiss Chalet. My co-workers and customers wanted to know more. I told them I was writing a book. “When will it be published?” they asked. I replied that I had no idea; it wasn’t ready yet. Where did I find the time to write a book while working at a restaurant and raising a family? they wanted to know. “You do what you have to do,” I said. It was astounding that my customers were more interested in my story than my own family was.

Helen came to the restaurant without Mark one day. My heart sank. I ran to the hostess stand.

“Where’s Mark?” I asked.

“I had to send him to a home,” she said. “I couldn’t manage anymore.”

She looked lonely and out of place. As fragile as a china figurine.

“You have to care for yourself now, Helen. You did all you could for Mark.”

“I saw a story about you in the paper. Boy, was I ever surprised! You never talked about yourself.”

“Some things are hard to say.”

“I know, but I’m glad you did when there was still time. Life takes opportunities away in a blink.”

Rachel’s Letter

T
he first publishing house I submitted my manuscript to rejected it. I was devastated. The editor told me I had too many characters in the book; as a result, the reader didn’t have a chance to feel for them. He had a point. I had to make it possible for the reader to feel for the prisoners, and in order to feel for them, the reader needed to get to know them. Too many characters made that impossible.

The only solution that came to my mind was to merge my cellmates’ lives. I would recount events as I remembered them, but instead of connecting them to fifteen individuals, I would connect them to four or five. My own story would be told exactly as I recalled it.

The editor’s concern wasn’t my only issue. I had to protect the privacy of my cellmates. I was not in touch with them to ask for permission to tell about their experiences, so I had to find a way to protect their privacy without compromising the integrity of the story. Merging my friends’ lives would solve that problem, as well.

Being rejected was painful, but I remembered what Lee Gowan had told our class about rejections. Every writer, he said, even the most successful, has been rejected, in some cases not only once or twice but tens of times. I couldn’t give up.

I allowed myself to feel devastated for only a day or two—after all, being upset was normal. But I knew I had to move on, rewrite, and try again. Not every publisher is the right match for every writer. I believed that the right publishing house for me was out there, and I had to persevere and find it.

Altogether, I took seven creative writing courses to obtain the Certificate in Creative Writing from the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto. My manuscript became my Final Project—the last step before graduation. For the Final Project Tutorial, I had to submit eighty pages of my work to an instructor who would work with me to improve it. Then I had to defend my work in front of the Final Project Panel, which consisted of Lee Gowan, my Final Project Tutorial instructor, and one other instructor from the school or a prominent member of the literary community.

From the available instructors for the Final Project, I chose Rachel Manley. Lee Gowan had recommended her, and I had read her wonderful memoir,
Drumblair
, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1997.

Rachel Manley is the daughter of Michael Manley, who was the prime minister of Jamaica from 1972 to 1980 and then again from 1989 to 1992. Initially, I had resisted reading her memoir. Unlike me, Rachel came from a privileged family. I believed that we couldn’t possibly have anything in common. I was nobody and she was the daughter of a prime minister. She had probably lived a very comfortable life and had always had everything she had ever dreamed of. What would a woman like her write about?

I read Rachel Manley’s book, hoping to learn from it, and I felt ashamed for the judgment I had placed on her. Yes, she was privileged, but she had had her own trials, and she had beautifully put them into words. She had transported me to Jamaica, a country I knew almost nothing about. Through her words, I felt her love for
her country, as if I had been there and had seen its beauty through her eyes, the eyes of a curious little girl raised by her grandparents, trying to find her place in the world. In an odd way, maybe my life had been easier than Rachel’s, because I had had no legend to live up to.

I decided to give Rachel my entire manuscript, even though I was only supposed to send her eighty pages. How could I take my life apart? That would be like dissecting a body and offering only an arm or leg to explain the person.

She asked me to deliver the manuscript to her house so we could meet and chat. I got off the subway a few stops too early and decided to walk the rest of the way even though her home was quite a distance. It was just before 10:00 a.m. Most stores were still closed and office workers were already at work, so the street was quiet. Every few minutes a red streetcar glided by. It was the end of summer, and the sun had already grown weaker. In Tehran, the weather had never been an important factor in my life because the weather was usually good. With the Alborz Mountains north of the city, Tehran does not have a desert climate and enjoys mild springs and falls, hot dry summers, and relatively cold winters, including some snowfall. Shortly after we arrived in Toronto, the obsession Canadians have with weather surprised me. Didn’t they have anything better to talk about? I gradually discovered the reason for their fixation. Anyone who has waited for a bus at –28°C with a wind chill of –37°C understands what I mean. In most parts of Canada, good weather is a novelty, something to be savoured and cherished. Once summer ends, I try to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin as often as I can, because I know that the mercilessly long winter is just around the corner. How fortunate I am to live in a country where bad weather ranks as one of its people’s biggest problems!

My mind went back to Rachel. She could hate my manuscript. She might not be the Rachel I had come to know from
Drumblair
.
After all,
Drumblair
was a book and Rachel was a person. Was Jane Austen truly the person I came to know through her writings? Even though she wrote fiction, now that I wrote, I understood that a writer cannot hide behind her words, because the writing will be superficial. Jane Austen was magical in making her readers feel the emotions of her characters, and to do this in such a masterful manner, she had to be honest. So in the end, I decided to trust Rachel Manley.

Rachel lived in a little brick townhouse on a clean, quiet street. As she welcomed me, her musical Jamaican accent made me think of the gentle waves of the Caribbean Sea. I followed her as she quickly climbed the flight of stairs that led to her living room. She was packing to move to another house, and boxes lay scattered everywhere. She apologized for the mess and explained that she was moving because her current home was too tiny for her many visitors from Jamaica.

That I was in the house of a great writer who was the daughter of a prime minister was hard for me to believe, yet Rachel seemed as frazzled by life’s little challenges as anyone. Would I have felt the same visiting Jane Austen at her house, nervously waiting for her to read my book?
My book?
Yes, my book. But what if it never got published? What if no one ever read it? What if my memories died with me? No, I wouldn’t allow that. I would fight to have my story remembered.

I sat at Rachel’s dining table, and she inquired about my manuscript, tucking her straight brown hair behind her ears.

“So tell me about your book,” she said with a reserved expression on her face. I told her the same thing I had told Lee Gowan—and I watched her eyes change. Before sharing my story, I had been unaware of the powerful effect it would have on people. To me, it was simply the story of my life, which I was still trying to understand. I didn’t see it as extraordinary. I wasn’t looking for pity
or even sympathy. All I wanted was for people to know, remember, and never let what had happened to me and others in Iran happen again.

I left my manuscript with Rachel, feeling as if I had reached inside my chest, pulled out my heart, and put it on her dining- room table.

Now I had to wait.

A few weeks later, I received this email from her:

Dear Marina
,

I have lived with your book, and therefore with your spirit, for the last month. I cannot say how profoundly it has affected me. It is quite exquisite. It slowly moved into my mind like a plant growing, and I am full of its leaves and musings. It even made me cry, which I haven’t done reading a book in a long time … It has such depth and beauty and human forgiveness, that at the end we are left more with your calm than with the horror of what was done to you
…

Rachel

She liked it. Really liked it! She had called it “exquisite”! I said the word and it made me smile. For some reason, I had never considered that writing could be exquisite. For me,
exquisite
was an adjective to describe a soufflé or a creampuff. I read her email again and again, until I had almost memorized it: “… at the end we are left more with your calm than with the horror of what was done to you …”

My
calm?
Yes, maybe that was the right word for it.

Or was it? Two or three people who had read my manuscript told me they had felt a “lack of emotion” in my writing. Of course it had a lack of emotion. What did they expect? That I would allow myself to feel?
I had been in a state of shock.
Writing about what
had happened to me in Iran meant living it again. Was this so hard for “normal” people to understand? The truth is that a tortured sixteen-year-old girl removes herself from the horror surrounding her, because if she doesn’t, she will lose her mind. When raped, she feels ashamed, so she shifts her focus from herself and tries to find normalcy, kindness, and humanity in a world that has slipped into madness. How else could I have felt?

Calm.

Rachel was very kind and generous, but she was wrong about my “calm.” What she had called calm was a state of shock that refused to let go.

Still, she had liked the manuscript. This was what mattered.